


Does It Feel The Same When She Calls Your Name?

by PanicFOB



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Based on an ABBA Song, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Language, Mamma Mia - Freeform, POV Second Person, Song Lyrics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 10:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20405872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanicFOB/pseuds/PanicFOB
Summary: After a year of friendship, Steve kisses you. Will he give you ultimate happiness, or will he break your heart and walk away from the pieces? This fic was inspired by The Winner Takes It All by ABBA.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Another fic for another writing challenge. Hope you enjoy this little two-part mini-series :)

You tapped your pen nervously against your desk. You’d been up all night last night, thinking of what Steve might say if you saw him today. Last night had been…unexpected… and wonderful… and scary… and everything you had wanted for a year.

You started working in the accounting department for the Avengers Initiative over one year ago. You met Steve Rogers five days later. A traffic jam had caused you to be late, so when you arrived on the compound, you had to run to try to make up lost time. A green tea was sloshing around in a to-go cup in one hand, and your briefcase was swinging wildly in your other. Your office was on the third floor of the main building, and you normally took the stairs for a bit of exercise, but there was no time for it that day. You hurried into an empty elevator, facing the back wall and taking a deep breath, and just as the doors were about to shut behind you, you heard a deep voice.

“Mind if I hop on?”

You whirled around to see who the sexy voice belonged to and somehow managed to hit Captain America right in the stomach with your briefcase. You were speechless at the horror of what you’d done.

He scratched the back of his neck, looking at you with a quizzical eye. “Uh, ouch?”

Finally, your words found you. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Captain Rogers.” He was still standing in the doorway of the lift, obviously waiting for you to answer his question. “Yes, of course you can hop on.” You stepped back against the wall to make room for him.

He walked in and let the doors close. “It didn’t actually hurt, by the way.” You gave him a skeptical look, the feeling of humiliation still reddening your cheeks. “Super-soldier and all that.”

“Right. Well, I’m still sorry.” You focused on the elevator wall, trying to ignore the building awkwardness as the elevator began to rise.

“What department are you in?”

Your head snapped up. Was Captain America really going to make pleasant conversation with you? “Um, accounting.”

“Ah, that makes sense I guess, since you’re going to floor three.”

“Yup.” Jesus, the discomfort was still growing. “I suppose I don’t really have to ask what department you’re in,” you tried for a measly joke.

He let out an obviously forced laugh. “Technical support, actually.”

That… was actually quite funny. You let out a real laugh.

The elevator was slowing down, nearing your floor. “You have a really lovely laugh,” he said, and when you turned your head quickly to look at him, you saw that he was blushing now as well.

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened with a ding. “Uh, thank you. I’ve gotta get to work. It was nice meeting you, Captain.” You started to walk backward out of the lift, still looking at him.

“Nice meeting you too, accounting.”

You paused for a moment, realizing you hadn’t even told him your name. “It’s Y/N, actually.”

He nodded his head at you. “Y/N, hopefully we’ll run into each other again soon.”

You smiled at him before turning around and rushing off to work. The blush on your cheeks remained all day long because you couldn’t go a second without thinking about Captain America telling you that you had a lovely laugh. The sound of your name on his lips didn’t help matters either.

Two weeks went by before you saw him again. You’d been staring at the same receipts for hours, underlining and highlighting things, trying to get your brain to work properly. You nearly jumped out of your chair when that velvet voice said, “Hey, accounting,” right in front of you. You looked up at Captain Rogers with wide eyes, having no idea what he would be doing in your office.

“Is there something I can help you with, Captain?”

“Hmm? Oh, no, I was just on the third floor, and I thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

“Oh… well, hello then.” God, the awkwardness would never end between the two of you.

He gestured to the spare chair in your office. “Care if I sit?”

“Of course not!”

“How’s work going?”

“You don’t really want to hear about boring accounting woes, do you?”

“I don’t mind,” he answered with a smile and a shrug.

So you told him about your day, including all the lackluster details, and it somehow became a regular thing for him to stop by your office when he wasn’t busy. When there were no world-threatening dangers, Steve would come by daily, but sometimes you went nearly a month without seeing him. It easily became your favorite part of the workday, and although you didn’t begrudge Steve Rogers for being a busy Avenger, you always felt a little bummed when he couldn’t come by to hear you whine about your accounting troubles.

After six months of these friendly office chats, Steve invited you to the bar with him and some of his buddies on a Friday night. You knew that it wasn’t a date, but that desperate wish in your heart for it to be one made you realize just how much the man had you wrapped around his finger. He officially introduced you to Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes that night. There was another Avengers team member joining you that you knew little about. Her name was agent Adeline Zephy, and you vaguely remembered seeing a press conference on TV about her joining the team only two months before you had landed your job in accounting.

Your three new acquaintances were very friendly, and even though hanging out in bars had never really been your thing, you made an effort to go out with them every once in a while. Steve could never get drunk off beers, of course, but he was always so carefree and jovial at the bar. He would often casually put his arm around your shoulders when you sat together at a table, and his knee always seemed to be grazing your own. Captain America was teasing you; you were certain of it.

Adeline would often sit sandwiched between Bucky and Sam, and you always wondered which of them she was dating, but you never had the courage to ask. Perhaps she was dating both; who were you to judge?

This whirlwind of a friendship with Steve Rogers led you to last night. You’d been in your office, swamped with work until late into the evening, trying helplessly to get caught up. Steve had been gone on a mission for three weeks, but the rumor was that he’d arrived back on the compound around 7 PM. You assumed you would see him the next day after he’d had a chance to catch some much-needed rest, but to your surprise, he was standing in your office doorway at about 8:30.

“Steve, what are you doing here this late?”

“I could ask you the same thing, accounting.”

“I had some important work I needed to get done before heading home.”

“And I had someone important I needed to see before getting some shut-eye.”

There was that teasing again. As if you were really that important in the grandeur that was Captain America’s extraordinary life. He grabbed the spare chair and pushed it over right next to yours.

“It’s been three weeks. I missed you.”

You rarely let yourself be vulnerable around him, but you couldn’t stop the words from coming out. “I missed you too.” Before you could regret your words, Steve was kissing you. He was kissing you like you’d never been kissed before. And you felt all the things at once: the shock, the wonder, the fear, the immense desire. It was a simultaneous hesitation and craving for more. You realized it was the thing you’d been hoping for since that day in the elevator, but you never let yourself ever dream it could be real. Captain America and the girl from accounting just didn’t have a good ring to it.

He pulled away after many long moments, and you were happy to see the endearment in his eyes. “I should get some sleep.” He stood from his chair.

“Yeah,” was all you could muster. And then he was gone from your office, and you were at a loss for how to feel about this development in your relationship.

Today though, you knew you were dealing with an entirely different version of Steve the moment you saw him. It was around lunchtime, and he walked into your office looking reserved, barely meeting your eye when he asked to speak with you privately. Your stomach wound itself up in knots.

“We could grab lunch and go for a walk outside,” you suggested.

“Yeah, all right.”

He barely said a word to you on the way to the cafeteria. Once the two of you made it back outside with a couple of sandwiches, you found a bench to sit at.

“What’s on your mind, Steve?” You were just going to bite the bullet.

He wasn’t looking at you, instead staring at a squirrel jetting across the grass. “I shouldn’t have kissed you last night.”

You got a sudden chill from his cold words. “Oh,” was all you muttered in response.

“As much as I want to settle down and have a normal life, that’s just never going to be a reality for me. I’m barely in New York, constantly flying around the world for dangerous missions. I have no right to ask a girl to wait for me to come home.”

“But you wouldn’t have to ask, Steve. I know you’re a busy man. I’ve understood that from day one, and I’ve never had a problem with it. I enjoy the time we do get to spend together, and I never begrudge you the rest.”

“You say that now, but you’d resent me soon enough. I couldn’t give you a life that a woman like you deserves.”

“I think I’m that one that gets to decide what I deserve.”

“Maybe so, but I just can’t do that to you. I can’t bear to leave you for a month’s time and wonder if you’ve changed your mind about me yet. Wondering each time if your love for me has turned to hate and I’ll come back from a mission to find you gone from my life for good.”

“If you really think I would do that instead of just talking to you like a grown adult, then you really don’t know a thing about me Steve Rogers.”

“I know you’re strong-willed and independent, but you pour your whole heart into people, and I’m not sure that I deserve that kind of love from you. It’s your right to choose what you deserve, but I know that I don’t deserve you. You’re too kind and devoted and calm and fun and normal. I would wreck your life if we tried to have something together.”

Up until this point, you had not lost hope. You had understood Steve’s reluctance, but you believed he only needed a little convincing. You had believed he cared about you. You still had hope that he could love an uninteresting woman like yourself.

But you were too normal.

And that was when Steve Rogers ripped your heart out.

“Too normal?” your voice was the coldest it had ever been.

“That came out wrong.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Sorry, I didn’t realize risking one’s life on the daily was one of your required qualifications in a girlfriend.”

“It’s not. I like that you’re normal. I just think that my superhero lifestyle would get to be too much for someone like you.”

You stood from the bench, collecting your trash from your lunch. “I actually let myself think that when you kissed me and held me last night that I actually belonged there. I was a damned fool.”

“Y/N, please don’t hate yourself for this. It’s about my problems, my complicated life, not—”

“It’s not you, it’s me? How cliché. Captain American can’t even come up with an original breakup line.”

“I really don’t want there to be so much bitterness between us, accounting.”

You glared at him, a newfound hatred shining in your eyes. “Don’t call me that anymore. Matter of fact, don’t speak to me at all, Steve. There’s nothing more to say.”

You walked away from him then, and of course, he didn’t follow you because Captain Rogers was not the man you had thought him to be.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course I couldn't leave you hanging without immediately posting part two! Enjoy, my dears :)

The next few days at work were hell. You were constantly on edge. Every time someone walked by your office, your head snapped up, looking to see if it would be Steve coming to stomp on your heart even more. Or worse, coming to grovel and ask you to be his girlfriend. If he did that, you had to reluctantly admit that you would probably say yes. You were that pathetic.

Thankfully, you made it through the end of the day on Friday without having to see him again. There was no get-together at the bar tonight, even if there had been you wouldn’t have gone. The Avengers team was attending some fancy awards ceremony thanking them for their latest success in saving all of humanity. You made yourself promise not to watch it on TV, knowing it would only depress you more. But three glasses of wine deep, you were flicking through the channels searching for the live footage.

The camera was cutting back and forth between panning shots of the guests and some speaker on stage. You had no idea who the person was, and you didn’t really care to listen to what he was saying. Each time the camera swept out over the crowd, you squinted your eyes, searching for the man that had your head in turmoil. Finally, after what felt like hours of anxiously scanning your TV screen, the camera zoomed on the row of Avengers.

Steve had Bucky to his left and Adeline and Sam to his right. You were surprised to see the agent between Steve and Sam rather than Bucky and Sam, and you wondered if she had had some sort of fight with the Winter Soldier. You didn’t have much time to contemplate it, however, because there was something even stranger happening on your TV screen. Steve had turned his head toward Adeline, clearly saying something charming, and she giggled and leaned into him. You felt bile rise up in your throat as you watched them share a kiss. It was chaste, but it had definitely been on the lips.

So it all made sense now. Steve had been tired and had a lapse in judgment, kissing the boring accountant who he could never consider as more than friend material. Within the same week, he’d been chatting up Agent Zephy because she could understand him better. She lived a life of danger every day, right there beside them. She was the furthest thing from normal.

You were fuming and devastated and disgusted and heartbroken. A year. You gave Steve Rogers the entirety of your attention for a whole year. He finally gave you something back: a perfect kiss. And then he took everything from you and gave it to Adeline Zephy instead.

Perhaps, what hurt most of all was that he hadn’t just been honest with you when you had sat there next to him on that bench pouring your heart out. Why hadn’t he just told you that he didn’t feel the same way you felt about him? Why didn’t he warn you that there was something going on between him and Adeline? Once again, you had to acknowledge the fact that Steve was not the perfect, honorable man that everyone assumed him to be.

Captain America’s budding relationship with Agent Zephy was the talk of the town. You hadn’t been the only one to spot their kiss that night, and the news was spread across the tabloids by the next day. You thought Steve might try to approach you, knowing that you must have seen the news by now. He didn’t, though, and you became even more certain that he never cared about you in the first place.

You ran into Bucky five days after the awards show. You exchanged pleasantries with him, and he asked you if he’d see you at the next bar night. You said, “Sure,” but it was obvious that you didn’t mean it. Your days were long and uneventful without Steve’s visits to your office. You began to really close yourself off, preferring to feel nothing at all in place of the unbelievable hurt that had consumed you during the past two weeks.

You had thought the hardest days were behind you, but you had been very wrong. The hardest day was when you ran into Steve and Adeline in the lobby of the main building as you were on your way up to work. They were laughing together, and you tried to slip past them without being seen.

“Y/N, can I talk to you?”

You halted and took a moment to school your face before turning to face him.

“Yes?”

He looked back at his girlfriend. “Adeline, do you mind giving us a moment?” She looked a little confused but nodded her head and wandered off to give you and Steve some privacy.

“I thought I told you there wasn’t anything else to say between us.”

“I just… I wanted to assure you that the thing with Adeline wasn’t going on when I kissed you.”

You were furious at him all over again. The numbness you had worked so hard to create was flushed away with a fiery rage. “So you got with her immediately after you broke my heart. Am I supposed to be happy about that?”

“No. It wasn’t like that. She just asked me to be her date for the event, and then we kissed, and then it just made sense to continue dating.”

“Steve, what do you want me to say here? Congrats?”

“What? No.”

“You win, Steve. You’re the winner. You get to have it all. You have your perfect superhero life with your perfect superhero woman on your arm. You never have to be apart because she’s right there with you, fighting through the danger together. Sounds pretty romantic to me.”

He didn’t say a word. You might have spotted a glimpse of regret in his eye, but you wouldn’t let yourself believe it was actually there.

“I wonder if when you kiss her you feel even half the connection that I know you felt with me.”

His silence was telling enough for you. You walked away from him for a second time.

That night, you were halfway through a container of Chinese takeout when someone started banging on your door. You ran to it and looked through the peephole. You let out an exasperated groan. Steve had driven you home from the bar one time, many months ago. But the universe was working against you because he somehow remembered where you lived.

You weren’t sure why you were doing it, but you opened the door for him. Before you had a chance to ask him what the fuck he was doing at your place of residence, his lips were pressed against yours with intense passion. You almost melted into it, but your brain was telling you that this was very wrong. You pushed against his chiseled chest with all your might, and he pulled back from you.

“What the hell, Steve?!”

“I was wrong before, Y/N.”

You held up your hand, gesturing for him to shut his damned mouth. “I don’t want to talk about the same shit we’ve already gone through. You’re with Adeline, so why are you here on my doorstep kissing me?”

“I’m not with her. I told her today that it wasn’t going to work.”

“Wow, you hop from woman to woman so fast I can hardly keep up, Rogers.”

“The only reason I tried things with her is in an attempt to distance myself from you.”

You narrowed your eyes. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

He looked up at the ceiling, clearly frustrated that he couldn’t get the right words out. “I was trying to get over you because I was in love with you. I’m still in love with you.”

“If you were in love with me, you wouldn’t have treated me that way. We were friends for an entire year, Steve. People don’t treat the ones they care about with such disregard. You had no concern for my feelings!”

“I acted like a real jerk, I know, but I do love you. I thought I was protecting your heart by not pursuing a relationship between us. I thought you’d be miserable every time I was gone for months on missions. In reality, I was fucking everything up and hurting you even worse than I could imagine. I’m so sorry, Y/N.”

There it was. Despite two weeks of absolutely loathing the man, you were still wrapped around his muscular, super-soldier finger.

“How do I know you won’t try to act all noble again, somewhere down the line? Ending a relationship because you think you’re protecting the one you love is the most idiotic trope in the book, and I won’t stand for it a second time, Steve.”

You could see hope returning to his face. “Will you give me a pass this once, though, if I promise to never do it again?”

He was adorable, standing in your doorway, biting his lip nervously, and fluttering those long eyelashes over his optimistic eyes.

“You’re lucky you’re so damn cute,” you mumbled.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a kind of.”

He was grinning now. “What does a ‘kind of’ include?”

“You visiting my office again, every day that you’re not on a mission. You listening to me drone on about accounting without complaint. You taking me on a date in the near future that will blow my socks off. You kissing me right now because I’ve been craving the feel of your lips against mine since that evening in my office. Even when I hated you, I could still feel the way they fit effortlessly against mine.”

He finally stepped into your apartment, closing the door behind him.

“I’d be delighted to do all those things, accounting.” And then his large hands were cupping your face, and when his mouth descended on yours, you felt him pull your soul away to a place of dreams, a place of perfection.


End file.
